Steve Barron’s Merlin was a magical TV mini-series that looked at the myths and legends of Arthurian Britain from the perspective of the eponymous sorcerer (Sam Neill) and other supernatural characters. Peter Benchley’s Creature was another fun mini-series, in which scientist Craig T. Nelson and his family encountered a mutated monster land shark, created during the Vietnam war and accidently released by treasure hunters.
A series of underwater earthquakes released a family of mutated salamanders that had grown to gigantic proportions in Gargantua, a cable TV monster movie made without any sophistication by Bradford May. Wes Craven “presented” Don’t Look Down, a Halloween TV movie in which Megan Ward played a reporter afraid of heights.
Stephen Tompkinson was the wimpy hero who uncovered a plot by a mysterious pharmaceutical company to develop a drug that caused those who took it to share their thoughts in the three-part series Oktober, based on the novel by writer/director Stephen Gallagher.
When a million year-old giant artifact was discovered in hyperspace, writer/executive producer J. Michael Straczynski reworked familiar themes from both H. P. Lovecraft and Nigel Kneale into Babylon 5: Thirdspace, the second in a series of TV movies based on the SF show, and David Hasselhoff certainly looked the part as special agent Nick Fury in the TV movie based on the Marvel Comics character. When dubbed scientist Udo Kier predicted that sun spots would result in the Earth experiencing a new ice age, various west coast characters whined and panicked as it got cold in the count-the-cliches disaster movie Ice.
Veteran Debbie Reynolds played a witchy grandmother who had to stop an evil warlock from returning the powers of darkness to the colourful world of ghosts and monsters in the Disney TV movie Halloweentown.
The best genre show to debut during the 1998 TV season was the Fox Network’s grim Brimstone, in which Peter Horton played dead police officer Ezekiel Stone who made a deal with the Devil (John Glover) to return to Earth and recover 113 escaped souls from Hell. Unfortunately, it was soon cancelled.
Meanwhile, the Wes Craven/Shaun Cassidy series Hollyweird, which was also being prepared for a fall debut on Fox, was never aired after the network decided to make some major changes in the show, including bringing in an all-new cast. It was supposed to be about three midwest teenagers who brought their local-access cable TV show about unsolved murders and bizarre nightlife to Hollywood.
At least Buffy the Vampire Slayer continued to build upon its solid fan base with strong characterizations and surprisingly dark stories, as the high school vampire-hunter (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends discovered that Willow’s new boyfriend Oz was the werewolf terrorizing Sunnydale; a jealous science student used a potion to turn himself into the kind of man he thought his girlfriend wanted him to be; a Nigerian demon mask belonging to Buffy’s mother brought the recently dead back as homicidal zombies; an experimental DNA process had the side-effect of turning school swim-team members into monstrous gill-men, and Buffy’s undead boyfriend Angel (David Boreanaz) escaped after spending centuries in Hell, only to be confronted by his many victims.
Buffy cast members also selected their all-time favourite music videos on the 1998 MTV Halloween special, Videos That Don’t Suck, which also included a behind-the-scenes look at the series, and Fox Consumer Products announced its own Buffy clothing line aimed at teenage girls.
Chris Carter’s phenomenally popular The X Files came up with a couple of scary episodes amongst the usual aliens and conspiracy plots. In “Folie a Deux” a man holding his colleagues as hostages tried to convince Mulder (David Duchovny) that his boss was really a mind-clouding insectoid monster that had been turning its victims into blank-eyed zombies, while in “Bad Blood” Mulder was accused of staking a pizza delivery boy because he believed he was a vampire. As the surprise ending revealed, the whole trailer park community was made up of the glowing-eyed undead. Unfortunately, the killer doll episode “Chinga”, co-scripted by Stephen King and creator Carter, turned out to be a big disappointment.
Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black had little more than a cameo in the best Millennium episode, “Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me”, in which four demons in human guise got together in a donut shop to discuss how things were going with their soul collecting. The rest of the second season plodded on, despite some major plot changes.
Poltergeist The Legacy, the series about the members of a San Francisco-based secret society who protect others from the supernatural, returned with a two-part story in which anthropologist Alex Moreau (Robbi Chong) was bitten by an old friend while visiting New Orleans and soon found herself transforming into a vampire.
Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal was hosted by an unconvincing Dan Aykroyd and supposedly inspired by the actual case files of The Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. Adding Matt Frewer and Michael Moriarty to the second season, O.S.I.R. investigators looked into the case of a family who had survived for more than a century without aging by drinking fresh blood, and travelled to swamp country to investigate the case of two murdered brothers who were brought back from the dead by their family as putrefying zombies.
Ultraviolet was a moody six-part British serial in which a police detective (Jack Davenport) found himself recruited by a covert organisation dedicated to eradicating modern-day vampires in a secret war being fought on the streets of contemporary London.
Malcolm McDowell brought a nice dark edge to his role as Mr. Rourke in the ill-fated revival of Fantasy Island, and Jeremy Piven was either the eponymous Roman god or a madman in the light-hearted Cupid.
In Charmed, Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Alyssa Milano starred as the three Halliwell sisters, who discovered they were witches. Using a magic recipe book found in the attic of their San Francisco home, the trio solved crimes of a supernatural nature. Mark Dacascos played a musician brought back from the dead seeking revenge in The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, which was based on the books and movies created by James O’Barr.
The usually tedious Star Trek: Deep Space Nine managed at least one memorable episode (“Far Beyond the Stars”) that looked at racism in the 1950s against the background of the SF pulp magazines.
Debra Messing portrayed bioanthropologist Dr Sloan Parker, who uncovered the existence of a new species dedicated to the annihilation of mankind in the underrated Prey. Robert Lee-shock was the new lead in Earth Final Conflict, playing bodyguard Liam Kincaid, a man more than human who was caught in the struggle between the alien Taelons and the human Resistance.
Sliders also revised its cast as Jerry O’Connell, Cleavant Derricks, Kari Wuhrer and the talentless Charlie O’Connell continued to travel (“slide”) between parallel Earths on the Sci-Fi Channel and discovered an apparently haunted hotel and a digitised world where their real bodies wandered around as zombie-like “Empties”. 7 Days was a time-travel series about an ex-CIA agent (Jonathan LaPaglia) who had to save the Earth on a weekly schedule.